Librarything

Those of you who still visit your blogs the old-fashioned way (i.e. not just through Google Reader) may have noticed a new addition to my sidebar - 'Random* Books From My Library'. This is a cool little widget that displays five random book covers from the 1000+ titles I've now got listed in my latest online obsession... librarything.

This site was brought to my attention by an anonymous commenter (which usually means it's Manchester David) who pointed out that the Book Meme I completed during my holiday week was compiled from a list of titles that librarything members have bought but tagged 'As Yet Unread'. Always intrigued by anything booky, I immediately went off to investigate, and stumbled into a list-making paradise that would surely have Nick Hornby drooling.

It's a simple idea - catalogue and rate the books on your shelves, then compare your collection with other, like-minded listaholics, presumably in the hope that you might stumble across some undiscovered gems (or just satisfy your snooping curiosity). Of course, when you have as many books as I do (not to mention countless comics and graphic novels, which are also gloriously cataloguable), this becomes a somewhat Herculean labour. Especially as librarything also gives you the option to select the exact cover design that you own, sometimes from hundreds of different variations. It's all very satisfying, if you're in to that sort of thing... but I've had to take a step back now, because when you wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "I better go check the cover of Jostein Gaarder's Maya on my bookcase - I might have chosen the wrong one on librarything!", you know you need help.




*'Random', of course, is anything but. Just as my wma-player on 'random play' will choose three Elvis Costello tracks in a row, depending on when you click on my blog you might find three Spider-Man books, four Stephen Kings, or three Bill Brysons and two Ethan Hawkes (and Hawke's only ever written two books - neither of them half bad, considering he's an actor). But the selection refreshes every few minutes, and sometimes it's much more varied. Click on the link below the list and you can see my full library... and if you feel like joining yourself, don't forget to mark me as a friend so I can nosey round your shelves too.